Single Hop IPA – Galaxy

Let me get this out there, I love IPA’s; English, American, Imperial, it doesn’t matter, it’s rare that i’ll find an IPA that I don’t like (Greene King – i’m looking at you >:-/ ). So it’s quite odd that I haven’t got around to brewing an IPA yet…

This changed a couple of weekends ago with my first batch – I thought i’d try a single hop American style IPA with one of my current favourite hops – galaxy. Thank BrewDog and their recent IPA is Dead series for the inspiration on this one.

Before we move on, here’s a PSA – always check your equipment!!! Somehow I managed to forget this golden rule resulting in me (a) putting 4 kg of grain in the mashtun when the false bottom was not properly attached to the drainage pipe, and (b) proceeding to put in the first batch of mash liquor with the drainage tap open on the mashtun…

So, one slightly moist carpet later I went on ok with the mash, but when it came time to run off the wort and sparge nothing was coming out!!! Not such a good start to the brew day. So, I had to scoop out the water and grain into another container to realise my error (the false bottom wasn’t attached) – once fixed I got all the grain and the mash liquor back into the mashtun and got to sparging. I managed to retain 24 litres of wort, with a pre-boil OG of 1.050 (target was 1.054 so we’ll call this close enough – I was just glad to be this far)!

Thankfully the boil was pretty much uneventful and all went to plan, ending up with 16.5 litres going into the fermenter with a post-boil OG of 1.057, again this was slightly below target (1.062), but I wasn’t too unhappy with that.

After pitching the yeast there was good fermentation going after 12 hours. I transferred the wort into the secondary fermenter (a pressure barrel) after 4 days.

After 10 days in the barrel it was time to bottle, the FG came in at 1.018, which is quite a bit higher than expected, so we’re looking at about 5.1% ABV, maybe the yeast will still get a little bit of work done in the bottles. In preparation for bottling, I added 180g of light dry malt extract to the barrel for priming, and then after a short while got down to filling my first few bottles, now here’s where it all went wrong again…

After the fourth bottle nothing else was coming out of the barrel – the taps and pipes were blocked with all the hops used for dry hopping! I ended up having to siphon all of the beer out and only managed to fill about 20 bottles (10 litres). 🙁

The bottles have been sitting for nearly a week now and they’re starting to clear a bit, but there’s some nasty looking crud at the bottom of a few of them – fingers crossed it’ll all taste ok! Next time i’ll work on putting a filter over the tap in the barrel. 🙂